Dell's Boomi has a fall update with an interesting twist. The cloud integration service includes a dashboard to illustrate how fast it is growing as well as the usual uptime and service levels.

Rick Nucci, CTO of Dell Boomi, outlined the metrics update to its trust.boomi dashboard along with other key features. Why? Before Dell bought Boomi a year ago, Nucci's biggest question from customers revolved around financing. Does Boomi have enough capital to depend on?

Today, viability of Boomi isn't an open question. However, customers want to know where Boomi stands in the Dell's product mix and future. "Customers want to know if we have traction and are growing well," explained Nucci. "Within Dell, customers want to make sure we're thriving. If we aren't transparent there are questions about whether you'll blend into the vapor of other products. We get asked about whether Dell will continue to invest in Boomi."

Part of those questions may be natural given that Dell is a hardware company increasingly adding software to its mix. But the questions make a lot of sense. Boomi has done well under Dell, but other software acquisitions simply get blended into other products. Another option: Software is acquired and then the customers are milked for the maintenance stream.

The fact Nucci is getting some real questions about Boomi's plan within Dell highlights how customers want to be clued in on where their cloud integration provider stands.

As for that fall update, Boomi has added a few key features designed to integrate services and software quickly. Two-thirds of Boomi's connections are on-premise applications to cloud services. A third of customers are integrating all cloud services.

Among the notable features:

Predictive assistance, which aggregates metrics and allows Boomi's support systems proactively ping customers that are having trouble. According to Nucci, this predictive assistance is designed to prevent shelfware and improve returns. Nucci noted that Boomi doesn't see any customer data.

Boomi launched a suggestion service that recommends integration points and data mapping. These suggestions are derived from Boomi's hundreds of customers. Customers can opt out, but haven't because hand data mapping is difficult and time consuming. Boomi Suggest is based on 13,000 index functions and more than 50,000 data maps.

A business rules engine that can be used in multiple integrations.

A partner dashboard so resellers can see all customer integration points on a single screen.